REVIEW: "Taxi Driver"

Martin Scorcese's "Taxi Driver" is the closest thing I've seen in cinema to the novels of Dostoevsky. It portrays man as isolated and confused amid a sea of rather disreputable, uncomprehending characters. Like Crime and Punishment or Notes from the Underground, "Taxi Driver" brings the viewer into the world of someone to whom the normal world of families and hugs and birthday cakes is untouchable and even unfathomable.
In the beginning of the film, Robert Deniro's Travis Bickle states that he wants to become "a person like other people." Tired of crusing the streets of New York and picking up scummy customers he despises, Bickle longs for the world of happy couples and big happenings he sees on his television at home. He fixates on Cybil Shepherd's beautiful blond white-clad campaign worker as his ticket into this world.
Initially it seems that Travis' efforts may be rewarded. He successfully wins a date with Shepperd's "Betsy". Unfortunately, his ignorance of normal people does him in. His attempt to take Betsy to a porn movie drives Betsy away. And Travis is forced to stay with the scum he despises yet shares the same limited language with.
This rejection changes Travis. Filled with bitterness at the coldness of Betsy and the world she represents, Travis sets out on what first seems to be a vague mission of organization, exercise, and militance, but what gradually seems to center itself around two goals: the assassination of Charles Palantine (Betsy's presidential hopeful) and the liberation of Iris (a 12-yr-old prostitute played by Jodie Foster). By mere chance Travis fails in his first goal and succeeds in his second, thereby becoming a hero instead of a villian. I'm not sure what message this might send, except that good deeds are not always done by noble people, nor are bad deeds always done by evil people. Travis is both good and bad, and really his actions don't seem to be motivated by any moral sense, just his shifting loyalties and emotions. When Travis picks up Betsy in a cab at the end of the movie, he even wishes Palantine well.
As Betsy says of him in a coffee shop when they first meet:
"He's a prophet and a pusher, Partly truth partly fiction, A walking contradiction."
There are many more things to be said about this film, but only one more I wish to add in. It strikes me as fairly ironic that though Travis complains of the coldness of the world, and longs to connect with others, he himself refuses to connect with Martin Scorceses' enraged husband. Clearly in an obsessive, dire state of mind akin to Travis', Scorceses' husband confides his story and wants desperately for Travis to react to it. Instead he remains stony-faced, just as the outside world is to him. In a world where those who are lonely can't even reach out to others in need of contact, what hope is there?